Find Competitor Weaknesses With Laser Like Focus

Before I go and reveal every juicy strategy to discovering the tools necessary to dig into every element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign, let me go over the elements we’re looking for. I’ll show you with the tools I’m about to reveal, you can see EVERY element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign.

First off… If you knew…

• Where they were getting their traffic from
• What terms they ranked for
• What keywords they pay for in PPC
• What keywords they’ve INCREASED or decreased spending on
• What landing pages they’re landing them on (and what copy testing they’ve done)
• What social media marketing they’ve done
• Who links to them and what press releases have gone out
• How old their site is
• Alexa, and other web stats…

Would you not easily be able to find unsaturated markets, or repeat successes of your competitors? I think you would! What if I also showed you how to have Google alert you about your competitors, even in the middle of the night?!?

Keywords From Competitor PPC Campaigns

To this day, the best way to find anything online is via keyword search using the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing) and that’s still how people find most things online. Chances are, if i asked you who your top competitor is, you’d already know. Or, at least you would probably know who the top business in your industry is online.

Keyword Spy Pro can download the entire Google Adwords (PPC advertising) campaign from a website, the landing pages they used, the ads they used and even the organic keywords they rank for. You could easily spot weaknesses in their rankings, in their ad campaigns, or simply duplicate them for the exact same successes.

Using the example above, we we’re able to get 50,000 ads from enterprise.com, 14,064 keywords and 560 competitors as well as around 50 of their top landing pages, their ad spend and ad budgets and pricing as well. Using this data, you could easily find which keywords and which landing pages have had increased budgets recently and use those as your blueprint.

Landing Pages & History

All the tools I’m about to show you reveal different landing pages. How long has that page been live? How much editing has been done? How far back does that go? You see, if you could tell that they’ve tried using the word "free" in their headline, or "cheaper" but ended up using the word "affordable" and sticking with that for the last year… Perhaps you wouldn’t need to do the same testing!

Using archive.org’s impressive spiders, and other big search engines have amazing cache tools you can use to find old pages, examine changes over time etc.

Social Media & Visibility

Wouldn’t you love to see a snapshot of a site and instantly know… "Hey, are the using any social media? Is anyone talking about them?" or what about just finding out just how much of an authority they really are? I love this tool, I hunted for years for something like it so i’m sure glad that I found it. It’s called SiteYogi , and it proposes to be the spiritual leader/guru of finding out how YOUR site is doing. However, *I* use it for digging up info about my competitors not my own sites!

This tool shows you:

Syndication

Validations

Social Bookmarks

Ranking

Backlinks

Indexed pages
And way more!!!

Taking a snapshot and comparing it to multiple competitors can really show you what your up against, dig up press releases, etc. It really shows you how much social, news & other powerful resources are being used!

Digging up Organic Search Data

There’s really no tool that compares with quite such detail and precision than that of SEOBook’s "Seo For Firefox Plugin". I’m a huge fan of it, and the tool to be quite honest has allowed me to extrapolate huge reports for corporate clients and provide juicy detailed competitive analysis that ultimately lead to the distruction of major top 10 results! Meaning we were able to get a #4 spot for "Car rental" using Google at one time just with this kind of data alone.

There’s no way I could list every feature this thing will reveal but let me explain how it works. First, you install the plugin into Firefox (Duh!) and then, select your settings in the tools menu of Firefox, enable it by clicking a little SEO logo in the bottom right of the browser and perform a search in Google. It instantly brings back things like the PR of each site, cache date, yahoo links, .edu links, age, alexa directories, diggs etc. I’m not listing it all.. but It’s wild, and quite simply the best tool on the market.

All this data can be found anywhere, and that’s true. However, directly against the search results themselves? No. More so, I *love* the export to CSV feature where you can actually excel sheet all this data. Absolutely amazing.

Competitor Link Data for SEO

They’ve got 24,000 links? What kind of links are they? What anchor text and where are they on the web? Ah, for that my dear friend I show you a tool that is the best at sleuthing out exactly which links are where and how they’re set up. The very best, in my humble opinion.

They’re coming out with a new version… That’s why to use it currently, you have to go to classic.linkdiagnosis.com, but I suspect if the classic version was the best link analysis tool I’ve ever seen, the next one will be even greater!

Search Results in Other Countries

Using redflymarketing’s special firefox extension, you can even observe what other countries see in their Google box. Being based out of Canada, I often use this tool to see if the ranking boosts I’m seeing are better in the USA than Canada or vice-versa for my clients. It lets you see other countries too.

Very powerful for seeing where your competitors are doing better or worse in the rankings, but also other competitors that may be focused more on US, UK, Canada that are marketing to a global audience.

Monitoring, Tracking and Further Analysis

Is it possible to watch all your competitors in a given market, even while you sleep? YES! Today I’m going to show you how you can monitor what they do, pretty much live to some degree. First off, I’d suggest looking at Google Alerts but setting it up to monitor your competitors using type – Comprehensive, how often – Once a day, and deliver to your email address with the search term either their domain, their brand or the product your concerned about, or all of the above.

There are other monitoring tools, but Google’s lets you go back and delete or change preferences of these alerts using your Google account. There’s many email alert systems that you’ll be stuck subscribed to for years that you’d pretty much have to cancel your email account and get a new one to get out of receiving.

RSS Alerts & Blog Alerts

Your competitors could be talking about YOU… Or perhaps you want to hear what OTHERS are saying about your competitors and their products. Maybe you’ll over hear the one feature everyone wishes they would fix, giving YOU the opportunity to come up with something the market truly thirsts for.

To track everything said in blogs and RSS around the web, simply visit Bloglines and in the top right, do a search for whatever you like. Perhaps enterprise.com (the domain of a competitor) or their product, etc…

Then, find the RSS icon as shown below… (See? I Put a big arrow to it for you!)

Then, go and visit feedmyinbox.com (bet they don’t even know it’s a great competitive intelligence tool!) paste the URL and your email address in there and recieve updates any time something happens on the web via RSS or Blogs! Pretty kewl, eh?

Competition Updates On The Go

Using Xfruits , you can even send RSS via voice, sms, text message to your cell phone, email or anything else! RSS feeds now encompass search results, blog updates, competitor website changes (sitemap.xml?) and tons of other things. I bet there’s ways of monitoring the competition with these tools even I haven’t imagined that you now have at your fingertips!

Do me a favor

If you found something AMAZINGLY juicy, something useful something you needed here. Please Digg, facebook, stumble upon something it!
Please tweet it, or something. Because we sure could use the links as we’re just building up the site and getting it going.

I’ve made convenient social buttons at the bottom of the post that should make it only ONE click to "digg" etc.

Until Next Time,
Daniel J Deyette